Heating Costs Rise – Tree Theft A Problem

It is not happening in the US. But it is happening in Germany.

With snow blanketing the ground, it’s the perfect time of year to snuggle up in front of a fireplace. That, though, makes German foresters nervous. When the mercury falls, the theft of wood in the country’s woodlands goes up as people turn to cheaper ways to heat their homes.

“The forest is open for everyone to enter and people just think they can help themselves, but they can’t!” says Enno Rosenthal, head of the forest farmers association in the northeastern German state of Brandenburg. “Naturally, those log piles belong to someone and there is a lot of money and work that goes into them.”

The problem has been compounded this winter by rising energy costs. The Germany’s Renters Association estimates the heating costs will go up 22 percent this winter alone. A side effect is an increasing number of people turning to wood-burning stoves for warmth. Germans bought 400,000 such stoves in 2011, the German magazine FOCUS reported this week. It marks the continuation of a trend: The number of Germans buying heating devices that burn wood and coal has grown steadily since 2005, according to consumer research company GfK Group.

That increase in demand has now also boosted prices for wood, leading many to fuel their fires with theft.

Well the Greens don’t seem to like coal. Evidently they are not too fond of forests either. They could always go for fracking to get more natural gas and thus lower prices. But Germans don’t like fracking. Thankfully the greens in America don’t totally control fracking. Otherwise we would have more poor freezing to death.

H/T Commenter Matt at Watts Up With That – Environmental concern disappears with economic instability.

I also liked what commenter ROM had to say at Watts Up…

The whole environmental and climate catastrophe movement and it’s infestations of completely irrational do-gooers and “saving the earther’s” has created a vast morass of unintended consequences, nearly all of which finish up as being considerably worse in their effects than the supposed and unproven, hypothesized problems would have ever created themselves.

Along with all those lists of those innumerable faded and totally wrong predictions of catastrophes to come and destroy life as we know it if CO2 [ due to pure and total ignorance, falsely labelled as “carbon” ] was allowed to increase, perhaps it is time for somebody to start the onerous task of listing all the unintended and usually harmful consequences arising from the past implementation of the numerous “planet saving” actions [ sic] of the “do-gooding” and “saving the earth” eco nuts.

A list of the suffering and the destruction of wealth and treasure and the destruction of living standards and the immense levels of destruction and damage to the environment and quality of living [ think bio-fuel; wood burning in power generators compared to coal, wind turbines and bird and bat killing, choosing “eat or heat” and etc and etc ] brought about by the do-gooders and the eco-nuts and their “saving the earth” policies would be quite enlightening to most of the public.

Well ROM I’m trying to do a little enlightening here. Mostly preaching to the choir though.